Are you a radical maverick looking for new ways to express
yourself?
Sure you are. TONY NAILOR has the book you need

Too fussy about personal hygiene to follow Swampy down his
tunnel? Too handsome to sell "Socialist Worker"? Radical,
but no imagination? Then Stewart Home's new book, "Mind Invaders",
could be just what you're looking for. "Mind Invaders"
brings together essays and manifestos from a growing sub-culture
of smirking cultural terrorists. In the absence of chic, Baader-Meinhoff-type
[sic] icons, Europe's radical mavericks - armed only with DTP,
websites and barmy ideas - are turning the satirical stunt into
the Molotov cocktail of the Nineties. "When the Celts went
into battle, the Druids would satirise their opponents.

But, their satire was so effective it could bring blisters to
people's cheeks," explains Home. Funny has never been so
serious.

All you need is a little gall. Take the four Italians, all called
Luther Blissett, who made headlines this year after they were
caught travelling ticketless on a Rome tram.
They argued in court that "a collective identity does not
travel with a ticket". Commuters, what are you waiting for?

"Mind Invaders" has something to kick-start even the
most jaded Citizen Smith. Mandy B's "Piss Manifesto"
offers practical advice and fashion tips for women who want to
liberate themselves from the chauvinist orthodoxy of having to
sit down to pee. Yes, girls, it's time to learn the art of upright
urination. Got a few weeks to kill? Why not organise a game of
urban poker, as practised by Glasgow's Nonsology Workshop for
a Non-Linear Architecture. Hands are made up from playing cards
found in the street. You want action? Then set up a branch of
the Association of Autonomous Astronauts - they're circumventing
the class struggle of today by taking the fight to outer space.
Goodbye NASA, hello community-based space exploration programmes.
"The point is that only those who attempt the impossible
will achieve the absurd", they argue. A rationale that, after
a few chapters, you will accept without question. At its worst
- see Home's own avant-bardist (really, you don't want to know)
Neoist Alliance - "Mind Invaders" is unintelligible
babble. At its best - see Luther Blissett - it's like an international
version of "Brass Eye". The Luther Blissetts, named
after the ex-Watford and AC Milan footballer (the subject of enormous
hype in the Italian press) are dedicated to subverting media conceits.
Their most notorious prank duped Italy's questionable prime-time
missing persons TV show, "Chi l'ha
visto?" ("Has Anybody Seen Them?"), into searching
for a non-exixtent British artist, Harry Kipper. A network of
Luther Blissetts in London and Bologna persuaded the show that
Harry, who was supposed to be mountain-biking around Europe to
link various cities with an imaginary line that spelt "ART",
had disappeared. Luther Blissett said: "We wanted to do more
than simply discredit the show, we wanted to make them waste their
time tracking a non-existing person, so that the real runaways
could stay free." Luther Blissett, now assistant manager
at his old club Watford, is somewhat bemused.

Like the Situationists, today's resistance culture is made
up of people who have abandoned the idea of people-powered politics,
and instead formed themselves into small groups which create their
own bulletins and pages on the Internet, and which try to create
stories and spectacles in the media to make their points to the
public. Think KLF, Peter Tatchell, and read a new book called
"Mind Invaders: A Reader in Psychic Warfare, Cultural Warfare
and Semiotic Terrorism"(Serpent's Tail, £ 9.99).
In "Mind Invaders", the author - punk novelist and journalist
Stewart Home - groups Decadent Action with a host of other international
media-savvy left-wing activists such as Italy's Luther Blissett
group (yes, they are bizarrely named after the Eighties Watford
footballer), which among other activities, uses radio broadcasts
to organise spontaneous street demonstrations. The groups in the
book (there are dozens, including the London Psychogeographical
Association, the Neoist Alliance, and the Nonsology Workshop)
all fall somewhere between over-educated joking, showing off and
challenging our conventional view of how reality works; if there
is a political point in it all, says Home, it's to do with the
long-term effects of the satire of our social system that groups
like Decadent Action present.